Samus Aran

There was no nunchuk. No Balance Board. No Wii Wheel or other peripheral in the room. It’s just me, a Wii remote and a short demo of the game.

“You hold it like this,” he said, handing the Wii remote horizontally like an old-school NES controller. That’s fitting because aside from Team Ninja Nintendo also brought some of the old team from the original Metroid to work on this current gen take on Samus Aran.

The game starts and our heroine narrates. It’s a familiar scene. At first, I can’t put my finger on it, but the cinematic showed Samus being held up in the air by a baby Metroid. She said, “I should be dead right now” or something to that effect. There’s a huge one-eyed monster coming after her.

The whole scene looks familiar. I swear I know this. The baby drops Samus to the ground and the one-eyed creature shoots a huge energy beam at the Metroid. It explodes and bits of “the baby,” as Samus calls, falls like rain upon her and suddenly she gets the Hyper Beam. This is the end ofSuper Metroid I said to myself. The Nintendo representative just nods.

And that’s where Metroid: Other M takes off. Planet Zebes is obliterated along with Ripley and Mother Brain. Samus returns to the Galactic Federation, where she’s analyzed and fixed up. For the first time, Samus narrates her story. She does this a lot, which makes the tone of the game so serious, that it’s dour.